New book tells tale of local architecture
New book tells tale of local architecture
Architect in Indonesia (1910-1926) Ir.J.L. Ghijssels Seram Press, 1996. 127 pages
JAKARTA (JP): This book was initiated by the architect's grandson Ir R.W. Heringa in honor of his Opa Snor (his mustachioed grandfather), Ir. Frans Johan Louwrens Ghijsels.
Ir. R.W. Heringa inherited the archives of his beloved grandfather when his grandmother died in the Netherlands in 1977. The archive consisted of architectural books, drawings, letters and photographs of his works. After having visited the sites and having seen the numerous buildings, he decided to compile a book, which was achieved with the help of many collaborators.
F.J. L. Ghijsels was born in 1882 in Tulung Agung, East Java. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic in Delft, where he obtained his engineering diploma in 1909. Among his contemporaries were Henri Maclaine Pont, H. Menalda van Schouwenburg en Thomas Karsten, all well-known architects in Indonesia.
Perhaps it was because he spent his youth in Indonesia that he decided to apply for a job at the Municipal Works Department in Batavia (Old Jakarta). In the summer of 1910 the appointment came and Ghijsels and his newly wed bride departed for the East Indies, where they arrived in October of the same year. In 1912 Ghijsels left the department and found employment in the architectural division of the Department of Public Works in Batavia.
Designs in this period were for the telephone office in Surabaya, the post office in Semarang (Central Java) and the KPM hospital in Jati Petamburan, Batavia (now Rumah Sakit Pelni). These buildings are still in their original state today.
In 1916 Ghijsels set up his own bureau called the Algemeen Ingenieurs Architecten Bureau (AIA). Its relationship with the royal shipping company Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschapij (KPM) was continued, and one of the first projects commissioned to the bureau was the head office building on Merdeka Timur, now housing the Department of Sea Transportation.
They went on to build several office buildings, hospitals, churches, theosophical lodges, recreation centers, etc. in Batavia as well as Surabaya, Yogyakarta, Semarang and even Kalimantan.
Many of these buildings have survived. Among the most well- known are probably the offices on Kali Besar, now housing the PT Samudra and Toshiba offices, the Kota railway station in Jakarta, the Internatio building in Surabaya and the hospital Panti Rapih in Yogyakarta.
Thanks to the habit of extensive letter writing (sometimes Ghijsels would write two letters a day to his wife when she was staying in the cooler mountain areas to escape the heat in Batavia) we are able to follow Ghijsels's aspirations, worries and his joy when a design has been accepted or when a building is finished. However, this book is not just an emotional journey to Heringa's grandfather's past; it has become an architectural history book of the first three decades of this century.
After his departure to the Netherlands in 1929, where he would settle with his family, the bureau continued to work and produced such monumental works as the Villa Isola in Bandung (now the IKIP teachers training college) and the Paulus church on Taman Sunda Kelapa in Jakarta.
As Ian Buruma wrote in his review of the Rem Koolhaas book S.M..L.XL: Small, Medium, Large, Extra large in the New York Review of Books vol. XLIII, nr 19:
"Holland is not a country that inspires people to think big. Dutch architecture, old and new, is notable for its lack of Babylonian pretensions... The Dutch left no monumental buildings in their colonies."
This statement may be true, but Ghijsels and the AIA certainly contributed some interesting sites and left some elegant buildings all around Indonesia.
-- Myra Sidharta